


and horizon

by smallestbrown



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Anchor Tim Stoker, Archivist Sasha James, Brief mentions of canon typical horror, F/M, Fearpocalypse time!, Light Angst, Slow Dancing, slow dancing in the fearpocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-03
Updated: 2020-07-03
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:54:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25042747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smallestbrown/pseuds/smallestbrown
Summary: Like she is now, creased of grime and dust, eyes gone mad and barely half-human even on a good day, Sasha doesn’t let herself Know what Tim sees when he looks at her.But she knows how he looks at things he loves.Archivist! Sasha, Anchor! Tim, and The Beach Boys' "Kokomo" in the Fearpocalypse.
Relationships: Sasha James/Tim Stoker
Comments: 10
Kudos: 44





	and horizon

**Author's Note:**

> the greatest of thank-yous to ceci for saying "kokomo by the beach boys is a timsasha fearpocalypse song" it's been in my head ever since

They’re in Edinburgh, she thinks, unbidden.

The land has blurred into this monotonous, murky brown—featureless, unrecognizable, cut up only by the blackened silhouettes of what were once houses and homes, and yet she Knows. Names and thoughts and all-that-once-was—it flails towards her in a static scry and stabs at a small, tender part at the back of her skull. Sasha groans.

“You alright?” Tim asks.

She glances to him. He looks more haggard than she’s ever seen him, the bags under his eyes stark and black—though certainly she’s just the same. Sasha wishes she could say she can’t remember the last time she looked in a mirror, but the number lands soft in her brain despite herself. Her skin feels grimy, and the dirt never leaves her fingernails.

“Mm,” Sasha hums in response. “Just tired.”

“Maybe we should take a break.”

“No point. Wouldn’t sleep anyway.”

She fixes her eyes on the shifting horizon again, a mess of neon and oily color. She feels Tim take her hand and wind his fingers through hers. 

“Alright.” 

She squeezes his hand weakly.

They continue walking in silence. As they wind their way through the flat and endless fields, for a moment, Sasha closes her eyes. She tries to dull her senses—always turned to hypersensitive, now, always everything too _loud_ and too _close_ —to the howling of fear in the new world she’s wrought. She steps with eyes still shut, and focuses on Tim’s hand in hers. But even with her eyes closed it’s like she can still see, further and further and beyond, louder and louder and _worse_ —

“ _Aruba, Jamaica—_ ”

She blinks, and looks at Tim. His eyes are on the distance, but he’s got a smile pulling at the corner of his mouth.

“ _Ooh, I wanna take ya—_ ”

Sasha huffs. Tim glances at her, his smile coming a little wider.

“ _To Bermuda, Bahama,_ ” he sings.

“Tim.”

“ _Come on, pretty mama—_ ”

“I know what you’re trying to do.”

“Is it working?” His smile slides crooked and easy, but there’s a current of desperation in his voice. She tries to smile back, even if it comes too twisted and sad. It’s the least she can do for him, here.

“Not many beaches for us to visit anymore, is there?”

“I’m sure I’ll find one. You may be the All-Knowing, Big, Sauron, Spacey Eye thing or whatever,” he knocks his shoulder against hers, “but finding good beaches? That’s a Tim Stoker job.”

“Mm—and how many wrong turns did you take on our way to Brighton, again?”

“Well you would _know_ , wouldn’t you?”

“I _would_ , because I was in the car!”

Tim is chuckling, his voice raspy and low, when a cry whip-cracks through her eardrums, high-pitched and vicious sharp. Sasha grits her teeth and tries to hide it.

“ _Key Largo, Montigo—_ ”

The scream explodes over her throbbing temples, over-loud and overlaid over Tim’s singing.

“Tim,” she snaps, snatching her hand back to press at her skull. “Please, stop.”

“Oh, come on,” his chides gently, but his tone drowns in the distance of someone sobbing in Sasha’s ear, “I can’t try to lighten the mood?”

“Lighten it to _what_?" She’s losing him as the frequency between her ears rises and rises in glistening hysterics. Sasha feels wrong-footed and horrible, she can’t—hear him properly—

“I don’t know, anything other than this Fury Road _wasteland—_ ”

“ _Tim!_ Can you just—”

She cuts herself off. The wailing stops. Tim sobers quickly, and he looks away to the horizon with his jaw clenched.

Sasha rolls her lips beneath her teeth regretfully. They taste like dust.

“You’re right,” Tim says. He exhales heavily and nods, eyes still on the beyond.

There’s something there, and even if Tim can’t see it and Sasha can’t See it, they both know it’s there. The shape is wrong, but the knowledge isn’t: something just past the ridge of the sky with a million eyes. Large and looming, past the edge of the world as they knew it.

“You’re right,” he repeats. She watches him consciously uncoil the tension from where it had built in his joints, a learned response to his automatic frustrations. “It’s—I just...”

“I know.”

He grimaces at her use of words. “But _I_ don’t,” he points out. She sighs again.

“Well what do you _want_ , Tim?” It comes a little sharp, accusatory, but—she’s so _tired_. Everything is so _much_. “We’ve got a lot of ground to cover before we reach Elias, so what do _you_ want to know?” 

Tim frowns at her. “This can’t be it, right? This—forever. Purgatory _ad infinitum_.”

“Some might call that the very _definition_ of purgatory.”

“So. That’s what this is, then?” His voice has gone a soft.

Sasha only dimly notices it; her gaze drifts past him to the horizon, though she still feels his eyes on her, searching. So many eyes. So many people.

“It’s... what comes after the end. What’s left after—humanity.”

She gazes further at the edge of the world. Where the false field meets false sky, the world is colored a shifting ooze of metallic hues like oil on concrete, and suddenly—it’s like she’s piercing through, stabbed through the fabric of the world and hurtling towards it and more and _more_.

“Torn piecemeal from their families, their homes and comforts, what comes after is a song of torment and undeserved, unjustified reckoning.”

The howl of someone—Kamala Arush, age 45, as the skin is peeled from her phalanges from proximal to middle to distal bone—rises through the sky, a chorus on a cacophony wings to mix with the screams of—Philippe Auteuil, age 26, listening the fire spread to his roommate’s bed and pleading for him to wake up—

“It is _apocalypsis_ , the uncovering, it is things seen and unseen and should not be seen and will be made to be seen—”

Lisa Gerardi, age 63, baling in lungfulls of dirt as she scrambles in any, in every direction—and something else, close, too close, calling to her—

“—And _witnessed_ , arbitrated and found unworthy in every respect and _punished_ , not by divinity or holy or hell but by itself, unmade by itself, choosing to unmake itself—”

“—Sasha!”

She snaps back into focus, breathing hard, head swimming. Tim is in front of her, gripping her shoulders urgently, too tight and painful. Sasha focuses on the pain there, rather than out _there_ , for fear of being pulled away again. Tim’s expression is wild and frenetic, his eyes and cheeks wet.

“Sorry,” she breathes, coming back to herself. They’re both breathing hard.

Tim breathes in, unsteady, and shakes his head, leaning in to kiss her forehead, lingering. He takes her hands. Lets their breathing even out, thoughtful, careful.

“You and me, Sash,” Tim says, looking at her.

There’s a howl in the distance, and it cuts off uncomfortably quick. He swallows and squeezes her hands again, and again, Sasha hones in on the feeling of him, rather than that of the—everything, everyone, everywhere that crowds in on her.

The buzz of him tickles at her brain, familiar, electric. Like she is now, Sasha could Know him without even trying, like the pond-skip of a stone on a lake: an effortless leap, a touchstone from something solid to something solid. The urge to reach across the gap towards him and take and Know boils guilty and unlovable in her gut.

But in truth, it’s the slow and steady _knowing_ of him that she has loved, and Sasha holds it in her heart delicately. The learning of how he holds a pen (between his third and fourth knuckles), how he tells a joke (petulantly, sometimes, breezy, more often), how he likes to kiss (steady, breathless, gasping on to her cheeks with laughter). The bits and pieces _given_ , happily, eagerly, rather than stolen. She clutches the carefully constructed and ever-incomplete knowledge of Tim, _her_ Tim, closer than any pretense at reality she might have left.

Like she is now, creased of grime and dust, eyes gone mad and barely half-human even on a good day, Sasha doesn’t let herself Know what Tim sees when he looks at her.

But she knows how he looks at things he loves.

He leans his forehead against hers and breathes out against her temple.

“We can go anywhere. I’ll go anywhere with you.”

Sasha huffs a watery laugh, and Tim does as well. He moves a hand back to her face, smoothing the ridge of her cheekbone with his thumb. “Seriously,” he adds. “Run away, face it all—anything.”

Their linked hands dangle between them, loose and heavy. Neither of them looking at each other. Sasha grounds herself in the feeling of his fingers wound with hers, tries to retract her senses back into that one spot of contact. Takes a shallow breath.

“You and me, Sasha James.”

She knows what he’s promising.

“Key Largo,” she whispers, humming under her breath, “Montigo...”

She doesn’t need to look to know the soft smile breaking out against his lips. “ _Baby why don’t we go—_ ”

Tim chimes in with, “ _Off the Florida Keys,_ ” and Sasha closes her eyes and listens.

“ _There's a place called Kokomo..._ ” His voice is hoarse, a little. Kind of broken. “ _That's where you want to go to get away from it all._ ”

Tim’s hands slip cautiously around her waist. It amazes her, sometimes, how Tim still handles her with care. Even after everything, bitter and bruised and broken, he is still slow when it counts. Slow and soft.

Sasha moves her hands up his arms, circling behind his neck. She leans her cheek against his shoulder, tucking into his neck, and they shift back and forth, gentle. She keeps her eyes closed, and her breath steady.

“ _Bodies in the sand, tropical drink melting in your hand_

_We'll be falling in love to the rhythm of a steel drum band_

_Down in Kokomo._ ”

Around them, time dips and dives and dilates in ways that make little sense. They stay there swaying to the hum of Tim’s tenor and the howl of the wind for as long as they can stand.

“We’ll be okay,” he says softly. It doesn’t feel like he’s saying it to her.

Another cry splits the sky. Even though she doesn’t want it to, the knowledge slips into her mind, unbidden and guilty.

Sasha swallows, pressing her lips to the skin where his neck and shoulder meet like a promise. Like goodbye.

_No, we won’t._

**Author's Note:**

> love a kudos. love a comment. also on [tumblr](https://smallestbrown.tumblr.com) and [twitter](https://mobile.twitter.com/smallestbrown)!! goodnight sleep tight


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